international search of library catalogs?

Hiya Stuh

It kind of depends on where you are.

Australia, for example, has a national Inter Library Loan network where member libraries loan books to each other (at a standard rate) and each library then takes responsibility for their member's book borrowing.

Go to your local public library and talk to them about how you might go borrowing books from other libraries. If you get no joy from a public, try a university library - they should at least have someone on the information desk who has an idea of ILL works in your country.

It is highly unlikely a library that you are not a member of will loan to you - you will need to be a member of a library that is part of a inter library loan network.

That said a lot of public libraries don't do many inter library loans so you can help them by finding who holds the book you want and giving them the details (of the book and the holding library) for them to follow up. University libraries are more likely to understand the mechanisms. In both cases charges will be passed on to you in most cases.


You can see a list of online catalogues at http://lists.webjunction.org/libweb/

There are tools that let you search multiple catalogues, in Australia this is an example:
http://voyager.its.csiro.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=dbPage

There are a list of tools to search catalogues at: http://lii.org/search?query=Online+library+catalogs;searchtype=subject

Good luck....

[a couple of edits to get that last URL to work]

hey hingehead,

I am a university student and they are always happy to get me books from interlibrary loan

however, the way the system works is I tell them what book I want...and then they look for it and get back to me.

so if I'm looking for a list of 20 books, I would have to file 20 loan requests! I don't want them to have to do all that bookkeeping...I want to search for myself to determine which books are even AVAILABLE at ANY library...and then request those that I know are available when I'm ready for them.

I did discover this libweb thing, but it allows you to search FOR library catalogs, not WITHIN library catalogs!

So if I wanted to do a search on a book, I would need to go through every single catalog and run my search on that catalog...which would be 7,200 searches.

So you see the desire to have a webprogram that searches through all of them for me!

Edit: just noticed that the Voyager link does this, although it doesn't seem to be searching a very large network

however, it IS very helpful, because it shows that what I'm searching for is officially called a "Library Network Catalog"

Hi Stuh

Another thing to search for is z39.50 and metasearch.

Z39.50 is the protocol library systems use to allow their catalogues to be searched by third party products - which is what the voyager system was using to search multiple australian catalogues.

There was a product called hotmeta built by DSTC but it looks like it's lapsed.

Have a look at http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Software/Federated_Searching/

It's a normally a run by a special system for libraries only, not any public website. Don't ask me why. For library loaning, they have special programs that don't have ANYTHING to do with a website. Sorry .

Ask me. If you offer a service that tells you where a book is, then people will expect to be able to loan it, and as I laid out in my original message, libraries are very antsy about who they loan too.

Two other reasons spring readily to mind. ILL is one of the few forms of income generation libraries have - so they don't want to be 'disintermediated'. And lastly, the same reason doctors don't let nurses do things they are better at than the doctors - keep the craft in house and preserve the gravy train (I couldn't find a emoticon with it's tongue in its cheek but if I could this is where I'd put it)

Rare library books
I guess it would depend on how really rare the books are. If they are priceless or very, very expensive, they are probably in libraries that don't lend them out...you know, the ones you have to put on gloves to even touch.

However, if you are talking merely unusual books, most libraries of any size have an interlibrary loan staffer whose responsibility it is to look for such books for patrons. There are subscription services available only to libraries which allow for such searches. You might inquire at the nearest large library near you for such a service. Good luck.